Celebrate New Orleans’s Mardi Gras At These New York Restaurants

The best place to sample the Cajun/Creole cuisine of New Orleans during the month of celebration and parades leading up to next Tuesday’s Mardi Gras day is obviously the Crescent City itself. But for those who are in New York instead of New Orleans, there are options for celebrations and excellent dinners including recent arrivals, a favorite reopened and a pop up in the mix of the city’s dining scene.

Filé Gumbo Bar which opened in Tribeca last year puts its specialty up front, presenting a rich, earthy gumbo that can be customized by spice level and protein additions. Chef/owner Eric McCree didn’t come into the chef profession the traditional way: he was an audio engineer for Broadway shows, not a cook, until the pandemic shutdown put him out of business. He’s also from Idaho, not Louisiana. But he grew up eating Louisiana specialties in his visits there courtesy of his grandfather Aubrey Gaines known as Tiny.

Tiny’s Gumbo, the menu’s centerpiece thickened with the ground sassafras leaves filé powder as his grandfather did, starts with the flour, butter, chicken and pork fat roux that forms the base simmered for fours and chilled for several days allowing the flavor to intensify. Onions, celery, bell peppers, Cajun spices, fresh herbs, chicken stock, and the selected protein are then combined in steam kettles along with the chosen protein: Andouille sausage, crab, shrimp and other seafood, all flown in from Louisiana daily, along with chicken. Other menu items include a vegetarian gumbo and other Louisiana specialties: Andouille and Shrimp Jambalaya; Char-grilled Gulf Oysters; BBQ Shrimp; Crawfish & Crispy Okra Étoufée and at lunch the mixed Italian meat sandwich Muffaletta and Fried Shrimp or Crab Po-Boy among them.

To recreate the New Orleans feel, a jazz band plays at brunch on weekends, marching up and down the restaurant’s aisles. And on Mardi Gras day, the restaurant is also hosting a party, with beads handed out, the Gumbo House Band playing jazz, passed appetizers of Fried Oyster Sliders, mini Muffulettas, Hush Puppies and Grilled Blackened Shrimp, an open bar for Sazeracs, Hurricanes and French 75s and a four course dinner including Crawfish Bread and Char-Grilled Oysters, Tiny’s Gumbo, Blackened Drum Fish with Crawfish Étoufée, Grilled Creole Salad with Fried Shrimp and a dessert sampling. Guests are encouraged to wear Mardi Gras colors gold, green and purple. (Reservations for the party on OpenTable.com.)

Brothers Alex and Miles Pincus, known for their seafood restaurants on vintage schooners Pilot and Grand Banks are from New Orleans, where they also operate an atmospheric oyster bar Seaworthy in a 19^th century Creole cottage in the Warehouse District. Last year, they opened a funky, subterranean New York sibling to it, Holywater, also in Tribeca. The décor is eclectic, a combination of vintage and whimsical, and the menu dotted with family favorite recipes such as Alex’s Chicken and Andouille Gumbo (usually available only on Mondays but available nightly through February) and their mother’s pralines along with BBQ shrimp, Oysters (with or without caviar) and Seafood Towers. Leading up to Mardi Gras day, their NOLA specialty cocktails such as Rum & Rum Sazerac, Mezcal Hurricane and Arnaud’s Special Cocktail are 2 for 1 from 5-7 Monday-Thursday and all night Sunday before Mardi Gras day to get patrons in the proper spirit.

Inspired by the weathered charm of vintage absinthe and oyster bars such as New Orleans’s Olde Absinthe House, Williamsburg’s Maison Premiere has been popular for its extensive oyster lists and creative cocktails for over a decade, with the exception of a yearlong closure at the start of the pandemic. Guests can pull up a seat at the horseshoe bar near the replica of the Olde Absinthe House’s absinthe fountain, a corner leather banquette or from May-November in the back garden for a daily changing selection of at least 25 East and West Coast oysters plus clams, lobsters and seafood plateaux sourced directly from producers. Apart from absinthe drips and cocktails, there’s also tableside Sazerac service.

The Standard Grill isn’t a Cajun/Creole restaurant normally but for three days, February 20-23, the Meatpacking District restaurant will put those flavors on display with “A Taste of New Orleans,” a collaboration between the restaurant’s Executive Chef Paul Hargrove and New Orleans native Dominick Lee, Executive Chef of New York’s Alligator Pear opening this spring. The menu will send any fan of this cuisine into a state of euphoria: Char-Broiled Oysters; Dirty Rice Boudin; Gumbo; Roast Beef Debris Pasta; Vegetable Jambalaya; BBQ Shrimp; Shaved Catfish and for dessert Sno-Balls (shaved ice flavored with syrup) and Bananas Foster, the flambeed, rum and brown sugar sauced dish that has been known to induce euphoria on its own.

Another restaurant that doesn’t usually feature this cuisine is returning from a two year hiatus to link to Mardi Gras. French Roast on the Upper West Side is featuring a special menu at lunch and dinner including Shrimp Po’Boys, Jambalaya, Beignets and Bananas Foster, live jazz in the evening on Mardi Gras day from the band Bedlam Swing, New Orleans’s Sazerac and Hurricane cocktails and gift certificates for anyone who finds the plastic baby figure in the King Cake (a Mardi Gras ritual.) The festivities start on February 17^th and run through Mardi Gras day.